War
Against All Puerto Ricans by Nelson Denis, 2015, Excerpts
Shortly after the 1898 US
invasion, Hurricane
San Ciriaco, one of the largest in Caribbean history, destroyed thousands
of Puerto Rico farms and nearly the entire 1898 coffee bean crop.
The United States sent no
money. Instead, it outlawed all Puerto Rican currency and declared the island’s
peso with a global value equal to the US dollar, to be worth only sixty
American cents. Every Puerto Rican lost 40 percent of his or her savings
overnight. Then, in 1901, a colonial land tax known as the Hollander Bill
forced many small farmers to mortgage their lands with US banks.
Interest rates were so high,
that within a decade, the farmers defaulted on their loans, and the banks
foreclosed. These banks then turned a diversified island harvest – coffee,
tobacco, sugar, pineapple, and other fruits – into a one-crop cow. That crop
was sugar. The very first civilian governor of Puerto Rico, Charles Herbert
Allen, used his brief tenure to become the King of Sugar.
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